Posted on 09/23/2007 8:05:43 PM PDT by JTN
HUDSON - The relief on Richard Paey's face was obvious Thursday evening as he was helped from a government vehicle in the driveway of a home he had not seen in more than three years.
Amid family, neighbors and a small group of media, the 48-year-old spoke softly. "In the immortal words of Dorothy, 'There's no place like home.'
"Freedom is really everything, probably more than life itself," he said. "This is a sign that America is a great country. The system goofed up, but we're willing to address that."
His wife, Linda Paey, hugged him and stepped back, smiling wide.
"This morning we were scared to death," she said. "Tonight, you're home."
Hours earlier, the family was pleasantly astounded by news that Richard Paey's 25-year prison sentence for drug trafficking was being overturned and that he would be sent home that day. His case was heard in Tallahassee by the governor and state Cabinet sitting as the Board of Executive Clemency.
Traditionally, inmates must serve one-third of their time before becoming eligible for the clemency process, but the clemency board last month approved a waiver allowing his case to be heard early.
The Paey family arrived at the Capitol to be jolted by the news that the state parole commission had forwarded the case with an unfavorable recommendation.
Emotional Plea Helps Sway Board
An emotional appeal from the family helped convince Gov. Charlie Crist, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson and Attorney General Bill McCollum that Paey had been wronged when he was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to a mandatory 25 years behind bars.
Paey was the victim of a 1985 traffic accident, and botched back surgery left him in chronic pain. He also suffers from multiple sclerosis. He was arrested by Pasco County deputies in 1997 after a three-month investigation of unusual prescription fulfillment.
In his 2004 trial, Paey's attorney argued that the painkillers were obtained legally and used solely by Paey, but a jury convicted him on seven counts. The volume of pills involved in the formal charges, 700 tablets of the painkiller Percocet, triggered the mandatory sentence for trafficking. Those charges stemmed from seven different incidents of filling prescriptions of 100 pills each between January and March 1997.
Advocate Champions Release
Since then, another lawyer, John Flannery of Leesburg, Va., a national advocate for chronic pain sufferers, has steered appeals through the courts and the clemency process. On Thursday, he told the panel that Paey is "a pain patient. Not a user. Not a dealer."
Despite surveillance that failed to establish Paey sold the drugs, authorities concluded at his original trial that Paey could not have consumed such a volume on his own. But Flannery said Thursday that was indeed the case. In fact, Flannery said, state doctors were treating Paey's chronic pain with a morphine pump that delivered in just two days more medication than Paey was sent to prison for obtaining.
Flannery's outline of the case was followed by tearful testimony of family members and a friend that silenced a Cabinet room packed with more than 100 people and their supporters petitioning for pardons, the restoration of their civil rights or authority to own a firearm.
A one-time neighbor, Alexis Muckle, now 20, described Richard Paey's role as her father figure. "I never knew what having a father was like," she told the Cabinet members. "I love him very much … I probably wouldn't have graduated or cared about anything" without the Paey family, she said. "I just think the right thing to do would be … to let him come home. We need him."
Through tears, daughter Elizabeth, 16, said her father's case "is like a nightmare to me.
"I just wish he would come home," she said. "It gets lonely. My mom's always gone at work, I just wish I had someone to talk to. I just wish this would all end."
Daughter Catherine, 17, said, "I don't want him to miss any more of us growing up."
Crist abruptly moved for a full pardon, which would not only free Paey from his sentence, but erase his felony conviction and restore his civil rights, something convicted felons often must petition for.
Bronson told the governor he understood why law enforcement and prosecutors pursued the case, "but this was a gigantic problem in the making from the very beginning."
'We Aim To Right A Wrong'
McCollum called Paey's case "the worst example you can imagine with respect to minimum mandatory sentences."
Approval of the full pardon was unanimous.
"They call it 'justice,'" Crist told the Paey family. "That's what we're doing here today. We aim to right a wrong, and exercise compassion, and do it with grace."
When Crist told the family Richard Paey would be released that day, the Cabinet room erupted in applause.
An assistant to State Attorney Bernie McCabe, whose office prosecuted Paey, told The Associated Press that McCabe was in meetings Thursday and would not comment on the pardon.
Inside a stucco home on a quiet street Thursday night, Helen Paey saw her son for the first time since he was sent to prison.
"Oh, my God, I can't believe it," she said, as she wiped tears from her cheeks. "I'm so thrilled to see you. I'd think of you and start crying. This was so ridiculous."
Paey held his mother's hand.
"I missed your food, mom," he said with a smile. "I was starving. Look how much weight I lost."
More on Richard Paey
Casualties of the stupid drug war.
Yeah, but just think of all those neat guns and cool toys LE gets to buy using seized money/property while keeping us safe from people in pain and the vicious and dangerous pot smokers.
That poor guy! I’m starting to lose faith in juries more and more. So many have been conditioned to believe the government to be right unless proven wrong that due process is almost impossible now. A person in a suit and tie on behalf of the government can get a jury to believe anything, and a judge will allow almost any case to proceed no matter the lack of evidence.
I live in Hudson. Just hearing about this case is frightening.
Paey is a Harvard educated attorney who it took several trials to convict. I think, if a man like this can be railroaded, what chance do the rest of us have?
My girlfriend was telling me a case the other day about a couple of homeschoolers she knew who were conducting a science experiment in the front yard with vinegar and baking soda. Their parents were in the house. The kids were arrested by a passing cop and hauled away in handcuffs without the parents even knowing what happened.
It took a lot of friends and work to keep them from being charged and sent away. I think, what is wrong with the justice system that ordinary people living life can be persecuted like this?
Ok - I have no doubt that this fellow has pain, and that he needs pain medication. But exactly what is law enforcement suppose to think when they find someone with 700 Percocet? that is a lot! Why carry that much with you, particularly when the prescriptions were filled at different times?
Something still smells.
You would be surprised how easy it is to sway a jury; especially if one tell half-truths.
After the OJ verdict you still had faith in juries?
Remember that the only people who have time to sit on juries are either government employee apparatchiks or people who are either too stupid to get out of jury duty or really don't have a lot to do during the day.
God help anybody who gets to be judged by the likes of that crowd.
Too many people look at another person and see the potential for evil. It is the truth of Conservatism that when one looks at another they see the potential for good.
Apparently he was found to have purchased a total of 700 percocets in three months, it's poorly written at best. Nowhere does it say that he had all 700 on him.
God help anybody who gets to be judged by the likes of that crowd
I see you you take your civic duty seriously.
If your "crowd" would do a better job, why don't you take the time to fulfill your responsibility?
unbelievable.
Do you work for the government?
When Paey and his family moved to Florida in 1994, he had trouble finding a new doctor. Because he had developed tolerance to the pain medication, he needed high doses, and because he was not on the verge of death, he needed them indefinitely.
Unable to find a local physician who was comfortable taking him on as a patient, Paey used undated prescription forms from Nurkiewicz's office (which is ILLEGAL)to obtain painkillers in Florida. Paey says Nurkiewicz authorized these prescriptions, which the doctor denies.
The Pasco County Sheriff's Office began investigating Paey in late 1996 after receiving calls from suspicious pharmacists. Detectives tracked Paey as he filled prescriptions for 1,200 pills (in three months) from January 1997 until his arrest that March.
Paey had purchased — 18,000 in two years
They also found 60 empty bottles of pain relievers
25 pills a day
he illegally possessed Percocet and other pills weighing more than 28 grams, enough to classify him as a drug trafficker under Florida's law
His back pain didn't stop him from having more children.
They discovered letterhead from Dr. Nurkiewicz and other stuff that also suggested forgery.
Two every four hours is 12 per day, or 84 per week. Evidently, he wasn’t even taking the maximum dose, or he’d have gone through 840 in 10 weeks.
Pain management is so necessary, just for normal life, for some people. God bless this poor guy, hope he lives peacefully from now on, he deserves it.
I hate lawyers, judges, and lazy government employees way too much to hang out at the courthouse.
Juries, how about the idiot who decided to prosecute this guy? How about the police who forwarded an information to the prosecutor even though they failed to find any evidence he was selling to anyone.
There are many steps at which this could have been stopped. The fact that it was not is just more evidence all of these laws need to be repealed legislatively.
I have been on Percocet at time myself after serious surgery.
2/10 mg every 6 hours for weeks.....that’s a couple a hundred pills per month
man...some of these John Law dope cops are such Nazis....and min/mans and confiscation laws
they throw common sense out the window
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